No Country: A Novel (9 page)

But first, provisioning boats arrived from the chandlers—more sides of dry beef, sacks of flour, barrels of rum from the sweetish smell, and bales of coloured cloth. Then the new recruits came aboard. There would be little turning room belowdecks. But what did it matter? Soon to be on London ground with a whistle on my lips and gold coins in my shirt, I waited impatiently for Mr. Connolly to give the order, but it was already noon and mealtime. We were given large portions of bread and dried beef. I ate with relish, as I had worked up an appetite. One of the sailors joked, “Eat up, boys—and those that can’t, give me your share—for I will need my strength tonight. I saw pretty Dolly or whatever her name be, waiting for me by the quay.” They clapped his back in companionable mirth.

At the captain’s call we gathered on deck. A steady wind had set in from the land by late morning, clearing the clouds, and a golden slab of sun fell on the waterway. It had turned into a glorious autumn day.

Mr. Connolly, on the upper deck, looked at all the men gathered on the deck. Some lascars stayed on the rigging, listening. Suddenly one new recruit, a greenhorn in well-fed euphoria, sang out, “God bless ye, Mr. Connolly, and this ship on this grand day.”

I waited with bated breath to see what would happen. He would like as not get the whip, for he had dared to speak out of turn from the deck, directly to the captain no less. But Mr. Connolly, smiling broadly, said in his booming voice, “A glorious day to ye all.” The ship broke into cheers.

“I’ve told our steward, Mr. Philpot, to give ye a full measure
of rum,” said Mr. Connolly, “with the evening bread and extra beef.” Mr. Philpot waved from the side of the lower deck, acknowledging the great hurrah that rose all around the ship. The new recruits were looking around with shining faces, expecting this to be a Christmas ship itself.

“My good men,” continued Mr. Connolly, “do ye see all the good signs? The sun has broken through, the wind is steady—and I know the winds. We’ll cast off now, men. Soon we will be west of France, then to the Africa coast and the Good Cape, and away to India. Let’s drink to that with our good rum!”

I heard mutters and wary grumbling, but no one dared to raise his voice. The disappointment about the sorry wharfside wenches faded, and the lascars sprang upon the rigging to let out the sails, which shook loose, filling with wind, and the ship slid seaward.

Staring with a sick heart at the receding land, I thought how I had found myself rich and lucky. Now I wished myself shoeless and penniless on that alien strand; I would surely have found my way back, somehow, to my lost home in Mullaghmore.

As I looked, the name of this damned place, painted on a faded wharf struck my eyes:
Gravesend.
I was being taken to India, on the other side of the earth, away from my waiting mother, sweet Brigid, and my friend Brendan. I felt my heart was dying. It was the thirteenth day of October 1843.

I went down to the hold and wept.

A great disquiet descended on us when Padraig did not return by Christmas. Mrs. Aherne took Mr. O’Flaherty with her down to Sligo to consult with Peter O’Connor, the businessman who knew some important people in Dublin. His recommendation was that we conduct an inquiry in Dublin itself.

Everyone thought that Mrs. Aherne could not leave Mullaghmore, for the baby was too small, but she made arrangements to have Mrs. Hanrahan stay with the mite, and with Odd Madgy Finn proven to be regular as clockwork, and the baby thriving now, there was no let or hindrance for her quest.

Old Mr. O’Connor agreed to accompany us, and we made the rounds of the grey buildings where, with the businessman’s intercedence, the great ones of Dublin deigned to speak to us. But it was all futile. I could think of no words of comfort as Padraig’s ma’s face grew more gaunt each day.

On Sabbath afternoon, I went on a solitary walk by Dublin’s port when I ran into Declan Clooney, a sailor friend from Mullaghmore,
just returned from a two-month sail, and quite surprised to see me in Dublin town. When I apprised him of our search, Declan became agitated, for he had news of Padraig. He claimed that a friend of his, Ben Gantry, with whom he and Padraig used to have a dram or two at Sligo, had spied Padraig in a fancy suit on the next quay boarding some ship, a large one. Surprised, Ben called out to greet him from his deck, without success in the wharfside din.

“And he is sure?” I exclaimed.

He certainly was, swore Declan. So I dragged him forthwith to Mrs. Aherne and Mr. O’Connor, who made detailed enquiries about departing ships from that period. But since Ben Gantry himself was away on another ship, and so many others had sailed from Dublin to such a variety of destinations, that we had to resign ourselves to the prospect that Padraig would return when he did.

“He is alive,” whispered Mrs. Aherne.

“Yes,” I responded in relief, “yes, thank God.”

•  •  •

B
UT THE MONTHS
passed.

Now when I got up of a morning and had the peat fire on the grate a-going again, Mr. O’Flaherty was the first to come and sit by it. The pupils came much later. I took the time to pray and walked upon the headland, and when I returned, the mist still smoky about my shoulders, I put the kettle on the strong fire where it began its day’s work with a hiss. Mr. O’Flaherty gropes for his glasses until, like as not, I find them for him. His left eye had a milky ring around its blue centre, and the other one was none too
strong. He had aged in the last few months. Although he has never talked about it, I felt, in an obscure way, he held himself partly responsible for Padraig’s disappearance.

I had built another room attached to it, so that we had what space we needed altogether. He had asked me many a time, and when my poor ma died one silent night last winter, and Mr. O’Flaherty getting more slow and wanting my company, I made up my mind. What use was it trying to keep that cottage? I could not carry its tax, small though it was. Truth be told, ’twas a relief for me, that decision—for in the evenings I became sore miserable in that cottage without the putter and talk of my gentle mother. Soon it would fall into itself, and the good earth reclaim it as if my parents’ lives had never existed.

With Padraig disappeared from the very face of the earth beseems, and I teaching all the lessons at the hedge-school, I thought to move in once and for all. It had suited us both. The children came, bright-eyed with the walk, and I led them in prayer before we got down to the lessons. When we did the recitation for the tables of multiplication, in that lovely singsong way, I always glanced out the window, expecting to see Odd Madgy Finn a-rocking with glee, keeping time with the numbers, but she did not come here anymore. The tree under which she used to sit had flourished and cast a generous shadow, but it had no company all the school day.

Madgy had nursed poor Brigid’s child, but refused to sleep in the cottage, although Padraig’s ma had so wanted that. Mrs. Aherne would set her out some thick slices of good bread, a pratie or two, slices of cheese on a china plate, and a glass of buttermilk, but Madgy got it in her muddled head that the good plate and clean glass were for someone else. She would not touch them—but returned stealthily when Mrs. Aherne attended to the shop—to steal
from her pantry, broken pieces of pratie, hard heels of cheese, even some rancid lard about to be thrown out.

Padraig’s ma saw how matters stood and began to leave choicer bits by the kitchen corner as if waiting to be thrown out to the dogs. Madgy Finn always ate them with relish, after which she would go off, pissing behind hedges, wandering about the hills. She would sometimes be seen walking the mudflats, toes kicking up sludge near the estuary, or on a rock in the afternoon, licking a fistful of dry sea-salt, her eyes closed in contentment or hunkered on all fours, arse in the air, drinking with loud, happy noises from a stream halfway to the Ben. Padraig’s ma had worried that Odd Madgy Finn would forget about the baby altogether someday. She tried to keep an eye on Odd Madgy Finn’s whereabouts, but ’twas no use whatsoever. Madgy would come back, never late for a nursing, as if the feeder and the fed were tied together by an invisible cord, and one knew about the other’s need, and nothing else was a let or hindrance.

Despite Madgy Finn’s dirty fingernails, unwashed hair, snot-ringed nostrils, drooling yellow mouth, the child flourished, with a headful of black curls, and everybody knew what Padraig’s ma saw before her eyes—she was a little Padraig, even down to the way she ran, on her toes, and the way she called out “Ma” for Mrs. Aherne, though no one had taught her that or otherwise. But her very first word was “Moomagy.” It was a word she had made up and was cross if anybody else said it.

When she cried out that name, no matter when or where, Odd Madgy Finn would bare and offer her goose-pimpled breasts to the child. The infant would suckle noisily, her minute palm playing with the other nipple, which would grow moist and ooze. Padraig’s ma would turn away, her face flushed with envy for mad and filthy Madgy Finn.

Maeve—as Padraig’s ma had named her—was that lively and that wild, and proved as much the prideful Irish as Maire Aherne herself, screaming and scratching her way when she would not be held. But she used to lie perfectly docile of her own free will on the filthy lap of Odd Madgy Finn. One day she would let her grandmother tie her hair with ribbons and flowers and braids; the next day she might not let her come close, or so much as make a stroke with her hair-comb. Maire had met her match and was completely in her power.

By this time in 1845, Maeve was almost two, and could lead anyone a merry romp about the kitchen garden, sometimes pulling up carrots to see if they were growing, to the distraction of her grandmother. But after a long time of running and hiding and chasing the chickens, and jumping about with the village dogs, she would call out, “Moomagy, Moomagy!” and our Odd Madgy Finn would appear, already with her bare teats flopping and thwapping about her chest as she ran and stumbled, speaking some excited babble into Padraig’s yard. Passersby would halt in their stride before they continued, shaking their heads.

Our children are usually edged out by their younger brothers or sisters, so at what age Maeve would be weaned was something none seemed to have thought about. By now Maeve was a romping child, and no more in real need of pap milk than I was. But there was no way to dissuade Odd Madgy Finn from showing up, or of Maeve calling and claiming her Moomagy.

•  •  •

W
ITH THE FIRST
falterings of the potato crops from that summer of 1845, more and more wandering men drifted through. In the past, even the tramps that limped and begged on their migratory
paths were familiar to us, but these strangers were a different breed altogether, desperate, angry, rooting all over the land, mostly men, but sometimes women with children. The older boys—not yet men—roamed, but without the softer ways of boys, harder, dirtier, feral.

Then one late autumn morning, in spite of Maeve crying, “Moomagy, Moo—ma—gy . . .” all over the village, and time rolling into evening, there was no hide or hair of Madgy Finn to be seen. Poor Maeve ran between Mrs. Aherne’s room and the street a hundred times, fretting herself and crying, until she came down with a small fever. Then, as a child does, she grew to accept the first great absence in her life, a weaning from the sure certainty that all children are born with—that it was no country where loss could come their way, that nothing would ever change in that place called home.

•  •  •

W
ITH
P
ADRAIG GONE,
I really did not know how his ma would live on. She mourned him in that hard silent way that can kill people. I would see her sitting at the door of her shop, even as I turned the lane to enter the village—and she would be looking eagerly, and then her face would fall. Oh, she was glad to see me, but every shadow around that bend in the lane held a breathless hope for her. There were crow’s-feet around her fine eyes now, and more than a frosting in the wild gorse of her hair.

Returning once from a solitary walk to Sligo, I paused to look at a scythe moon bent above the Bulben, when I spied Mrs. Aherne at her cottage-door, its peeping light catching a a part of her face. “Come to me, Maeve,” she was saying soft, “come here, girleen,
come to me,” her voice breaking on itself. The child stood leaning upon the heartless white wall, seeking someone else in the dark. “Moomagy,” she said into the darkness, “Moomagy?”

I left them, each to their separate seeking, and made my quiet way.

•  •  •

B
UT OTHER HEARTBREAKS
were beginning all over in our counties. Panic began to seep in like unruly tidewater the following summer. The blight had spread after the potatoes were dug. A white smear under the leaves of the potato plant had been thought the culprit. But now with the fine potatoes harvested and put away, no one expected trouble, thank God. This year’s green vigour of growth had shown, at first, no sign of any milky mould among the leaves.

Whether the disease had lain dormant in some diseased potatoes which got planted—or whether the deadly spores had outlasted the winter—our hopes were dashed. The blight had grown within the shoots themselves, and the dreaded white mould reappeared. If the weather were dry, the mould would die off and no great harm done, but Lord help us if the weather was wet.

Heavy rains were general all over Ireland. ’Twas warm, but we did not know how cold a fate awaited us in that downpour. News of the spreading mould fell like night throughout the land. Rumours ran that harvests were scanty in all of Europe. ’Twas small comfort knowing about your neighbour’s sore throat, when it is spitting and pouring blood you are, your chest riddled with death’s pain itself.

Now came the dread news of the potato crop turning black and pulpy, stench rising as the spade turned. At first we heard news
of the distant counties, of field after field of potato turning squalid and sodden-like. Niall McCabe in our village had the occasional letter from cousins in County Clare, where he said that such was the hunger among folk that notwithstanding the fear of fever, they were peeling what was putrid, eating the small stained morsels, and by so doing, dying in small and steady numbers.